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<h1>Why FRDL?</h1>

<h2>A little bit of history</h2>

Whilst the gliding community had been using loggers since
the mid-1990's, they were specialist devices, very expensive, and generally
displayed at least some navigational information.  
<p>
It is generally considered that it would remove half the element of competition
if pilots were permitted to use GPS information whilst flying in microlight
or Paramotor championships.  GPS is nevertheless a very useful and accurate
way of measuring pilot performance so 'blind' GPS loggers are required, while
the pilot is expected to plan and fly all tasks by 'traditional' means.
<p>
The rules for using GPS loggers in microlight and Paramotor championships
were originally written in 2002 around the first device to become available which
was reasonably priced and more-or-less met the basic requirement.  This was the <a
href="http://www.flymicro.com/fr/index.cfm?page=General%2FHome">MLR SP24-XC</a>
which is a normal hand-held GPS with firmware modified by the manufacturer so
it only displays GPS time, number of satellites in view, and battery and memory
status.  There are two <a
href="http://www.flymicro.com/fr/index.cfm?page=Software%2FMLR%20firmware">firmware
variants</a>; 2 sec logging and 5 sec logging, which with a memory for 8000
fixes gives an endurance of 4h 26 min or 11h 6 min.
<p>
The talented Spaniard, Jose Luis Esteban designed and wrote
a MLR download software which has been demonstrated many times to be an
essential part of the championship organizer's armoury.
<p>
The MLR has some significant faults, but in general has
proven to be fairly robust and reliable.  Unfortunately however, not long after it
came into use, MLR were taken over by another company who discontinued the
SP24-XC, and today it is impossible to find. Only one other type, made by Air
Observer in South Africa, has become available since 2003 but it is not very
cheap.
<p>
It is the responsibility of teams or pilots to supply their own loggers,
but with such limited availability they often don't have them. Championships
have been saved more than once by FFPlUM, the French microlight federation, who
bought a substantial quantity of MLR's and sometimes lend their spare ones to
pilots.  This has had the unfortunate effect that many pilots have not had much
experience of using loggers outside of international competition which means
organizers of championships see far too many simple problems such as tracks full
of errors caused by the them simply not being positioned in the aircraft
so they have a clear view of the sky.  These pilots get discouragingly poor
scores as a result.
<p>
With so many cheap GPS loggers available today, you might be
wondering why there aren't other types in use.  The answer is quite simple; the
hardware requirement in the specification is only half the story.  The other
half is in reliably and quickly getting the data out of them in a useful
format.
<p>
If you have 120 pilots in a championship, each with a primary and a backup
secondary logger, and the pilots fly two tasks in a day, it means the
organization has a significant job just to download these 480 tracks from
the loggers, let alone analyse and score them as well.  Practice has shown
that the downloading procedure must be as automated as possible because
with so many tracks to handle, manual intervention is an open invitation
for error.  Even one simple error such as the loss of a track can lead
to the voiding of the whole task, and if it is a poor weather week, the
loss of one task can lead to the loss of the whole championship.  Even with
these automated procedures, more than one championship has
come close to disaster through inadvertent loss of track data.
<p>
So the data obtained from loggers must always be the same, and an approval
system is described in FAI Section 10 Annex 6 which permits the use
in championships of loggers which have been checked to see the data they
produce is correct. Approval is by definition inclusive of the download
software, which perhaps explains why there are so few approved models.
<p>
In 2005, the World Microlight championships and the World Paramotor
Championships were held simultaneously at Levroux in France.  Even with
the generosity of FFPlUM, there were not enough MLRs
for everyone, and pilots without an approved type were permitted to
use a limited selection of Garmins sealed in an opaque container.
In the Paramotor championship it usually took about the same time to
manually get the data from 7 Garmins into a useful form as it took to
get it from the 150 MLR's and Air Observers with their automated software.
<p>
Levroux unequivocally demonstrated the case for dedicated software,
but because each logger needed a specialist version along with drivers and 
installers, if it went out of production like the MLR did, then creating
it could be a lot of work for nothing.

<h2>A new generation of 'driverless' loggers</h2>

<A NAME="test"></A>
In 2008, a new genre of loggers began to appear which
are sometimes described as 'photo loggers'.  They are intended to be used to
record a fix every second whilst you are out and about taking photographs, and
then when you get home, a special software is used to match the times in the
track with the times of the photos to effectively 'geolocate' the photos you
took.
<p>
The point about these devices is that they often record
their tracks to a SD card, or to on-board memory which in either case is 'driverless' 
and appears to the host computer as just another hard drive, in
exactly the same way as a standard memory stick does.
<p>
It is therefore possible to create a downloader software which is only dependent
on a genre of loggers rather than one particular type, and that is what FRDL is.
<p>
FRDL makes it possible to approve many different types of logger to the CIMA standard 
which match this broad genre.

<h2>What FRDL does</h2>

FRDL will download the data from certain kinds of these devices quickly and easily
and convert the output into a CIMA specification .igc file which may be read
by many commonly available flight analysis programs.
<p>
FRDL also adds a bit of value by backing up all log files it finds on a logger
and by instantly displaying a simple outline and altitude profile of the track it has
downloaded.  This means the downloading can confidently be done the moment
the pilot lands from a championship task with everyone being very clear in
the knowledge of what has been downloaded.  The logger can therefore be immediately
returned to the pilot which avoids the logistical problem of boxes full of hundreds
of loggers waiting to be read.
<p>
<table class="info">
<tr><td>
<b>New logger types</b>  It is fairly easy to amend FRDL
so it will download other types of logger of the 'driverless' genre.  If
you have a type which is not approved for use with FRDL,  simply send it to
the developer for an assessment. (See <b>Help - About</b> for
the current list of loggers which FRDL supports.)
<p>
Note that types with external comms (eg Bluetooth or GPRS) cannot
presently be approved to the CIMA standard so there is no point in
getting them to work with FRDL.</td>
<td><img src="icon_info.png" width="100" height="100" alt="Info" valign="top"></td></tr>
</table>

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